In no way is the intense historical drama Lady Macbeth a romance. Sure, it’s set in the Victorian era of corsets and crinolines, with a plot that hinges on female suppression, sexual awakening, forbidden passion, and revenge. But there’s nothing remotely romantic about this vividly stark tale about a woman so completely warped by a monstrous society that she becomes a monster herself.

The story is based on the 1865 novel, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, by Russian author Nikolai Leskov. It’s adapted for the screen by Alice Birch for director William Oldroyd; they retain the mid-Victorian setting, but relocate the action to the forbidding, windswept moors of northern England. This turns out to be an appropriately rough-and-tumble landscape against which the filmmakers present an astonishingly poised, refined, and chilling gemstone of a performance by 20-year-old Florence Pugh in the central role. Pugh is in almost every scene—the story proceeds from her viewpoint—and she’ll have you biting your nails in dread as her character evolves into something wicked, indeed.

We know nothing about young Katherine (Pugh) as the story begins on her wedding night. Attempting to converse with her sour, taciturn, middle-aged new husband Alexander (Paul Hilton), she explains that she loves the outdoors and the fresh air—just one more subject on which they don’t agree as the somewhat baffling night progresses.

It turns out that Katherine has been “bought” for Alexander by his stern, elderly, Bible-spouting grotesque of a father, Boris (Christopher Fairbank), who lives with the couple in the forbidding stone fortress of their house. We know nothing of Katherine’s life before she was sold into marriage, but the particulars of her dreary wedded life are quickly apparent: with servants to run the household, she’s expected to sit primly in the parlor all day—indoors—until she fulfills her purpose of producing an heir.

This seems increasingly unlikely as Alexander soon disappears from the scene for parts unknown—leaving Katherine to suffer the disapproving scrutiny of her father-in-law alone. But when Boris is also called away, she revels in her freedom, taking long walks and exploring the estate of which she is nominal mistress. And on one such foray, she interrupts a party of groomsmen in the stables tormenting her black maid, Anna (Naomi Ackie).

Trying to exercise the authority of her position, Katherine is shocked by the bold response of the ringleader, Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis). Viewers start to get uncomfortable when Sebastian, despite his treatment of Anna, soon becomes Katherine’s lover, unlocking her unspent passions. Besides the improvement in her sex life, it’s clear that Katherine is even more thrilled by the audacity with which Sebastian flouts authority and dares to make his own rules—lessons she herself soon embraces.

It’s best not to reveal any more plot details, but as inferred from the title, no good can come from any of it. A conspiracy of lies and deceit, cover-ups, betrayal, and murder most gruesome—often extremely difficult to watch—are all involved. We watch in horror as Katherine sacrifices more and more of her psyche and her soul in these twisted schemes, with cold-hearted aplomb—even as her objective becomes ever more obscure.

Which is what makes this movie fascinating. It’s never about anything so prosaic as a woman fighting for the man she loves. Katherine’s steadily fragmenting relationship with Sebastian is never the point; instead, she’s fighting a suffocating social order in which she has no voice, no power, and no recourse. The grim irony is how horribly she loses herself in her desperation to claim her selfhood.

Everything about Oldroyd’s filmmaking contributes to the sense of bleak isolation, showing how completely Katherine is trapped in her world of vast, cloudy landscapes, and plain, empty interiors. Men spit out vicious invective, if they speak at all; otherwise, the silence is so profound, Oldroyd doesn’t even use a musical score—except for a few ominous chords, when things get extra dire. This is not a movie to take to your heart, but as a psychological character study, it’s both grueling and profound.

LADY MACBETH

*** (our of four)

With Florence Pugh and Cosmo Jarvis. Written by Alice Birch. From the novel Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Nikolai Leskov. Directed by William Oldroyd. A Roadside Attractions release. Rated R. 89 minutes.

Both commemorative and zeitgeist-filled, Detroit is the angriest movie Kathryn Bigelow has ever made. Although she deserves the praise she got for The Hurt Locker, in Detroit, she reverses Zero Dark Thirty’s coziness with “enhanced interrogation.”  

An animated sequence describes the black diaspora to the north that made Detroit what it was by 1967—a company town with strictly delineated African-American ghettos, patrolled by a 90-percent white police force.

By the opening, before the rebellion begins, we’re completely on the side of the rebels. The cops raid an illegal after-hours club, but they can’t get in through the chained-up back door, and have to roust the suspects out on the street. There are a lot more celebrants inside than they’d expected, and the cops lose control. The tempo increases, in incidents caught by camerawork meant to recall Arriflex camerawork: we see a face in the crowd, smoking a cigarette and sizing the cops up fearlessly, a joker yelling at a friend he sees being hauled out in handcuffs: “Hey, you alcoholic …”  And then the Molotov cocktails start to fly.

After this carnival, we meet a main character, Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega) who is about to start his 17th hour of work, moonlighting as a security guard. Boyega is big, intensely restrained, and looks like a peacemaker—we can follow his presence through the chaos to come. Bigelow’s trick on us is that no matter what Dismukes looks like, he’s unable to stop the trouble he witnesses. Meanwhile Larry (Algee Smith) and Fred (Jacob Latimore) of the real-life band The Dramatics meet backstage for a big show at the Fox Theater—The Supremes (or a lookalike group) are opening for them, or would be if the show weren’t canceled.

Avoiding the patrols, Larry and Fred duck into a nearby hot-sheet motel. The sight of the neon Algiers Motel sign makes the long-memoried viewer’s stomach turn over. The Algiers Motel incident—New Yorker’s John Hersey did a book on it—is still officially unsolved.

As presented here, what happens is like a long home invasion. Will Poulter plays Krauss, the inept patrolman in charge, a fictional composite. Poulter has the serpentine eyebrows of Jack Nicholson—he could play the young Michael Keaton, too—and he brings a surprise to every scene. Playing a dedicated ethnic-hater, actors usually go big. The fear on this callow fool’s face is barely concealed.

Detroit gets caught up in its ordeal of beating, mock executions and ultimate murder—at half the length, it would have had twice the power.  

Bigelow proceeds the overnight ordeal with an unusually fun sequence. Two visiting Ohio girls (Hannah Murray and Kaitlyn Dever) tease the musicians over to the motel’s annex. Here, as in the beginning, we see the headiness of life during a civil insurrection, seen from what seems like a safe place, a swimming pool with beer-drinkers enjoying themselves. Then, at an after party, some more drinking, some yakking about John Coltrane.

The fun ends when Carl (Jason Mitchell), who gets tired of the strangers in his room, plays a stupid practical joke. He’s trying to make a point about how white people don’t understand the ambient fear black people live in: “I’m just acting,” he smirks at the end. Yes, and you’ve been caught acting by the audience, even before you admitted it.

Liberal wishy-washiness is evident in this otherwise startlingly intense film. Bigelow is no political sophisticate, and insists there were good apples on the DPD. But this is one of her best films, and an ornament to this year’s cinema, as exciting a year as we’ve had in ages. Detroit matches in intent Get Out, the Ferguson, Missouri documentary Whose Streets? and Justin Chon’s drama Gook about the 1992 L.A. riots.

She balances her startling force with sensitivity and sensuality. It’s said you can never make an anti-war movie, that some of the thrill of battle will leak into even the most pacifistic film. Give Bigelow credit—this certainly isn’t an anti-rebellion movie.

DETROIT With John Boyega, Kaitlyn Dever, Jacob Latimore, Jason Mitchell, Hannah Murray and Algee Smith. Written by Mark Boal. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Rated R, 143 Mins.